Just how bad it's become was evident the other night at Douglass College when former Gov. Christie Whitman spoke about President Obama's inauguration.

AP Photo/Mel EvansFormer N.J. Gov. Christie Whitman discusses the future of the Republican Party in a lecture at Rutgers University on Monday, Feb. 2 in New Brunswick.

"If you didn't see a sea change in American politics out on the National Mall, then you were not looking," said Whitman. And she's a Republican.

The week before, Robert Shrum, a Democratic operative who worked on many political campaigns--including Jon Corzine's and Robert Torricelli's -- came to the same place and talked about the "realigning nature" of the Obama victory. He declared: "I've never been prouder to be an American."

These are the rhetorical equivalents of the stuff hawked on the streets of Washington to the millions trying to find a view of the swearing-in. Like, especially like, "Barack Obama Air Fresheners--You Can Smell the Change."

We can all feel good a majority of American voters felt secure enough to vote for a black man, but when partisans like Whitman and Shrum invoke the Obama victory as the dawn of a new age in American politics, it's time to lock up the family silver and hide the children in the attic.

Politics hasn't changed. It is still about how the money and power of the many are distributed by the few. Even about life and death.

Whitman's talk -- both she and Shrum spoke at lectures sponsored by Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics -- was especially remarkable.

Everyone knows Shrum is a paid operator, but the former New Jersey governor used her appearance to promote her dewy-eyed view the GOP could actually become more than the regional, ideology-driven white men's club it proved to be last year--when the state delegation to the national convention didn't have one black member.

"No one group has all the right answers," Whitman said in her appeal to the Republican party to become more diverse. She spoke of the "positive suggestions" GOP senators would make about the stimulus and waxed poetic about an age in which Republicans and Democrats would play nice together in the political playground.

Credible, perhaps, for a reception among the polite in an academic setting where platitudes about principles and policy are served up with cheese cubes and colas.

But political parties -- whether dominated by white conservative Christians or led by a charismatic African-American -- are private organizations dedicated to their own survival and achievement of their own goals through the exercise of party discipline.

Hours before Whitman spoke, every House Republican -- including alleged moderates like New Jersey's Leonard Lance and Rodney Frelinghuysen -- voted against the only economic recovery plan currently available. Clearly a decision based less on conscience than party discipline.

She suggested the move was "stupid," but apparently forgot how she enforced party discipline to shove through 30 percent state income tax cuts and decimation of state government during her stint as governor. If you want to learn the origin of New Jersey's fiscal crisis and crushing local tax burden, look no further than the Whitman years.

The election of a black man to lead a country founded by slaveholders corrected an injustice but didn't purify American politics.

It's probably a good thing the House GOP acted the way they did. A good thing Tom Daschle's appointment as health czar failed because of poor vetting by a president we now know makes mistakes. We don't need everyone holding hands in Washington and Trenton and singing Kumbaya. We certainly shouldn't believe it will ever happen.

It's a trap. After the first Gulf War and near canonization of Trenton's own Norman Schwartzkopf, then U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley--whose career Shrum helped to sink--warned against hero worship in American politics.

"A democracy," he said, "doesn't need heroes." Heroes get us into trouble.

Shrum and Whitman spoke at program entitled "Because Politics Matters." At first, that would appear typical of the self-regarding nature of politics. Politicians think they really do matter--a view not always shared by many outside the field.

Yet, not many miles away, as Whitman was preparing to speak, men and women from New Jersey were gathering their gear and saying goodbye as they shipped out for a tour of duty in Iraq. There is a chance some will not come back whole, if it all.

It might help the pain and the fear to think of their departure as the act of patriots. But they are leaving because of the political decisions of elected leaders. So, yes, politics does matter, especially to the lives of those without access to the levers of power.

Politics can even be lethal--so let's stop pretending it's warm and fuzzy.